


The Importance of Reckless Children

by JackHawksmoor



Series: Lone Mandalorian and Cub [1]
Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, ManDadlorian
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-02-09
Packaged: 2021-02-19 11:49:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22110436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JackHawksmoor/pseuds/JackHawksmoor
Summary: There was a frightened child and a foundling in between the raider and the dying Mandalorian. The raider did not know it, but he had never been in a more dangerous position in his life.
Relationships: Baby Yoda & The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV)
Series: Lone Mandalorian and Cub [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1591528
Comments: 50
Kudos: 236





	1. Chapter 1

On the fields of Trinetrin, a child was about to make an unpleasant discovery. Not the everyday sort of unpleasant discovery any child might be faced with when growing up in a cold and uncaring universe; This was the type of discovery that birthed nightmares and made monsters and ended in tragedy.

The child had taken a speeder, which was not allowed. She was driving it with her younger brother, which was also not allowed. These were things she would think on later, when regret set in. 

They had stopped the speeder and were scanning the horizon. By a small stand of snarled and thorny trees, there was a black scar dug into the earth. The long golden grass had been torn up. A faint trail of smoke ascended into the sky. 

It marked the spot where a Mandalorian had gone into battle, and won. More or less.

Neither of the children knew this, and so after a brief conference- which mostly involved weighing the likelihood of them getting into further trouble vs. the satisfaction of their joint curiosity -the children settled back into their seats and turned the speeder to investigate.

Both children became less sure of their decision the closer they got to that trail of smoke. Pieces of freshly destroyed speeder were strewn all over the ground. There were several bodies tangled among them, very obviously dead.

The girl stopped their speeder, and stared. She and her brother breathed loudly, wordlessly, their hearts pounding. Neither of them had ever seen anything like it.

They hadn’t been told, in anything but the most general terms, about the raiders that would sometimes attack people traveling alone. It had been more practical to impress upon them both to simply never go far from the house at night. 

“I want to go home,” her brother said. He had not noticed the blaster scarring on the ground, or on the bodies, or on the trees. His sister did. She also noticed that one of them had fallen half into the brush, as though he’d been trying to shove his way through the snarl of branches to get to something.

She hopped down off the speeder. She didn’t know much about raiders, but she knew what they did to people.

“What are you doing?” her brother demanded, his voice very high and a little wobbly.

“Shut up, I’m looking at something,” she said impatiently, in the manner of older siblings everywhere. “Wait here.”

It was obvious that people had pushed through the bushes further into the stand of trees. She stopped, then looked back at her brother.

In the manner of younger siblings everywhere, he hadn’t listened to her. He’d gotten off the speeder and was looking uneasily at a single boot laying nearby.

The scattering of parts and people painted a strange picture. It looked like an invisible wall had appeared out of nothing and absolutely smashed the speeders to pieces. This was because that was more or less exactly what had happened.

“Wait here and watch the speeder. I mean it,” she snapped at her brother. “If it gets stolen I’ll tell father it was your fault.”

Her brother was outraged at the injustice. “Fine.”

There was not a great deal of tree cover on Trinetrin. The trees that managed to survive were a snarled mess of dead branches with a thin, deceptively pleasant-looking outer covering of leaves. It took work to push through. The air inside felt stale and close. Twigs clung to her clothes and hair like tiny scratchy fingers.

She broke through into a small clear area, and stopped cold.

She saw six dead men. What she saw was not everything that was there, but it was impressive enough to frighten her. Five of them were splayed out in a half-circle, as though they had been thrown and beaten and killed as they approached. The sixth rested against a gnarled root, propped up in the center of the others. The body almost looked like a doll to her; Its position arranged carefully, but lifelessly.

Five raiders, and in the center, a Mandalorian.

She let out a breath. It was the only breathing she heard.

She did not know what had happened. She didn’t know about the key moment of bad luck that had turned the fight sour, about the increasingly desperate choices that the Mandalorian had made, all leading to this silent scene among the trees. She didn’t know why the Mandalorian had fought so hard or who he had been protecting.

She was like a stranger wandering onto the stage of a tragedy at the final scene. There was a full play’s worth of sad, complicated events that had preceded what she was seeing. 

Regardless, she sensed enough of the truth to think that the sight of him fallen felt sad and unfair. His fine armor was painted with blood all down one side. There was something about the way he was sitting that she found oddly touching; It was as if he was trying to shield something.

She stepped around the bodies of the raiders and stood over the Mandalorian. He had something with him, she could see it wrapped up and tucked in against his side. His arm was curled around it. His helmet was tilted down as though the last thing he’d done was to check that it was still there. 

The truth was sadder. At that final moment of consciousness the Mandalorian had looked down and given what he’d thought was the last and most heartfelt apology of his life. He’d stared at the thing most precious to him in all the universe, his most important responsibility, and felt nothing but failure.

The girl leaned over, thinking it might be some valuable trinket or treasure. She was very wrong, but also, in a certain sense, very right.

The Mandalorian took a breath.

The girl recoiled in alarm, tripped over a tree root, and landed on her rear end.

The Mandalorian breathed again, declining death. It sounded raspy and congested. He was otherwise utterly still.

“Hey,” the girl said cautiously, after a moment. She reached out and touched his arm. “Hey.”

She meant ‘hey, are you alive, can I help you’ but she was uncertain and frightened, so ‘hey’ was as far as she managed to get.

It would not have mattered what she said to him in that moment. The Mandalorian couldn’t hear. His body was present, but he was very far away.

Her brother chose that moment to call for her. “Race! Let’s go, come on!” He was just about at the end of the small amount of patience he’d been born with, and his sister knew him well enough to hear it in his voice.

She looked once more at the Mandalorian slumped on the ground, at the blood on his armor. Panic was rising in her chest as she understood the full reality of the situation. 

She turned tail and ran.

“Tinnen!” she shouted for her brother. She shoved her way through the branches desperately, scratching her face and her hands in her haste. “Tinnen-” She broke through the edge of the trees, fighting with the last of the branches and half spinning herself around.

She fell down again on her rear just as her brother ran to her.

He grabbed at her, his eyes huge. “Did they get you?” 

They were normal siblings in that they loved and irritated each other in more-or-less equal measure. Tinnen had spent part of the time she’d been out of sight thinking about the terrible things that could be happening to her, and the rest of the time thinking about the things that would happen to him if he came home alive and she was dead.

“I need the emergency kit from the speeder-” she said, scrambling to her feet. He chased after her.

She jumped into the speeder and started tossing things around, searching desperately. “There’s someone still alive. I think he killed all the raiders.” She held up the kit with a flash of triumph.

“Wait,” her brother said, “that kit isn’t-”

She hopped down without paying attention to him, which was a mistake. “You have to take the speeder, go get mom-”

The thought of going home alone to face their mother was enough to distract her brother from what he’d been trying to tell her. It was an important bit of information; It would have kept Race from the unpleasant surprise that awaited her when she opened the medkit.

During their last harvest season Tinnen had gotten himself into a lot of trouble for trying to ride one of the exotic red buffalos they bred for show. He’d ended up with a broken wrist, and the buffalo ended up with a wound on its shoulder that they didn’t discover until it was too late for bacta. They hadn’t been able to show him at all after that. The prize money would have bought them two new droids, at least. Tinnen had been mucking out the buffalo stalls all winter as punishment.

Unfortunately, due to his temperament, the lesson Tinnen had learned wasn’t ‘do not ride the buffalo’. It was ‘do not let the buffalo wander off injured after you sneak away to ride him’. 

As a result, the emergency kit on the speeder was entirely cleaned out of bacta. He had been working on an excuse for that, if anyone eventually noticed.

It was both lucky and unlucky for the Mandalorian that the two of them were moderately reckless and disobedient children. Otherwise he might never have been found at all.

“What?” Tinnen squalked, his voice going very high. “No way I’m going, you go.”

“He’ll die, Tinnen,” she snapped, causing him to recoil a little. “Just do it!”

She ran back into the trees with an essentially useless medkit. Her brother made one more attempt to warn her of that.

“Wait-” 

His sister did not listen to him. He decided in a practical manner that the faster he left, the faster he could come back with a working medkit. He also decided, in a slightly malicious manner, that if she was surprised when she found nothing in the kit then it would serve her right for not listening to him.

He would have felt bad if he’d realized that one of the reasons she’d sent him home was to keep him safe. She was used to looking after him, and she never would have been able to just leave him alone with nine dead raiders and a dying Mandalorian. 

She did not think on the strangeness of such a relatively small group of raiders. She had been kept regrettably unfamiliar with their habits, and so had no way to know they never went out with a party less than ten.

The Mandalorian was still breathing when she returned. Tentatively, she reached out and curled her fingertips under the edge of his bloodstained breastplate, testing how difficult it would be to pull away.

The shifting of Din Djaren’s armor by someone outside of himself was a bone-deep warning that penetrated. He had no weapons at hand. He had nothing, in that moment, but the shreds of instinct.

He surged to life, grabbing at her, a silent, desperate ‘stop’. 

Race yelped.

The Mandalorian could see and feel very little, his thoughts splintered and dark. He was already feeling a drag back toward unconsciousness. Race could see and feel a great deal, most of it involving terror. 

“I’m sorry,” she said, breathlessly. He had her by the arm. It was not much of a grip.

She was not an enemy. The sentiment featured prominently in both their minds for a moment. The Mandalorian’s grip shifted a little, and it suddenly felt to her as if he were clinging to her.

Race was not aware of it yet, but there were several important things she was missing. The Mandalorian did his best to draw her attention to one of them. 

“The baby,” he said, grasping weakly at her shirt sleeve. “...is he…”

The Mandalorian looked around somewhat blindly, as though he was missing something. Race had definitely missed something.

“Baby,” she repeated, a surge of alarm displacing her fear. She looked at him, and then at the bodies of the raiders, then back to him. She leaned over, closer to him.

The small, carefully wrapped thing at his side was alarmingly baby-shaped. Race made a sound of pure dismay and reached for it. She fumbled with the cloth, exposing a very small green face.

The baby slept on, father away in some senses than even the Mandalorian had been.

“He’s here,” she said, her voice breaking. She pushed the wrappings further apart and held him close to the Mandalorian’s helmet. “See? He’s here.”

The baby was frighteningly limp in her hands.

She didn’t know it, but the baby had been fighting almost as hard as the Mandalorian, and he was injured nearly as badly. The cause of the injury was not something she would have understood. The Mandalorian knew how it happened and still wasn’t sure he understood.

He had seen the speeders chasing them hit a wall of air conjured out of nothing. He’d seen the baby go limp, all at once, like a light going out. The reaction was instantaneous and so severe that Din Djaren had thought for a despairing moment that his foundling was dead.

“Alive?” The fear was foundational enough that it pushed past the exhaustion of blood loss. 

To a Mandalorian, a foundling meant everything. 

The baby was alive, but it was not obvious without close examination. Race did not want to make a close examination. The dead weight of his body in her arms seemed to answer the question definitively enough.

She was kind, and he was injured, so she lied. “Yes, he’s fine.” She looked at the medkit, wanting very badly to set the still-warm body of the baby down. “I can help you, I just need to-”

The Mandalorian interrupted her. “The baby. You protect him.” He grabbed at her shirt. The desperation in his voice cracked her heart wide open. “Please.”

Race was certain his baby was already dead and cooling in her arms. It was, without a doubt, the worst moment of her young life. She would have nightmares about it for a very long time. They would be particularly bad when her own children were babies. Sometimes she would dream that the Mandalorian was holding them while she died. The moment buried itself into her heart like a poisoned arrow.

“I’ll look after him,” Race swore. She did not know then how much the situation would haunt her. She only knew that she wasn’t lying- she would pay for him to be buried with respect if it cost her every cent she’d ever made, if it meant she had to get a job mucking out buffalo stalls for the rest of her life.

He nodded, and slumped a little. He was, at that moment, hoping beyond hope that she would keep her word. 

Race set the baby down, relieved to have the limp weight out of her arms. 

“Just hold on, ok? I have-” Race opened the medkit. It was empty, except for a few sterile pads and some antiseptic. She stared at it in shock.

Her dismay distracted her from noticing something exceedingly important, which was the fact that something was making noise off to her left. If she had noticed, she would have been confused, thinking everyone besides the two of them were dead.

The Mandalorian had noticed, and was not confused. His blaster was still on the ground close at hand, but his fingers felt numb and thick. He couldn’t get them to fold around the grip.

There had been more than nine raiders.

“Go,” he said to the girl. “Take him, and run.” 

Race froze, confused and a little frightened, not understanding why he was fumbling with the blaster on the ground. Then she turned, and understood. In that moment she very much regretted ever stealing the speeder at all.


	2. Chapter 2

The raider staggering toward Race looked half-dead and ready to tear her to pieces. He’d had a blaster once, but the Mandalorian had shot it out of his hands shortly after the crash. All he had left was a knife. However, to a child, a man with a knife looked like the stuff of nightmares.

Race froze in terror. If she’d been older, she might have run. If she’d been fiercer, she might have fought. But she was only a moderately reckless child from a quiet buffalo ranch, and she had seen more violence in the past hour than she’d ever seen in her life. She froze up completely.

The last living raider was outraged and furious in the way successfully violent people often were when their victims put up a significant fight. This particular raider was a mechanic, and was valuable enough to them that he rarely went out with the rest, unless they expected an easy fight. Because of that, he suffered from a critical misapprehension that was common among people who had never come close to death. Until he’d met the Mandalorian, he had always been victorious, so deep down he took it for granted that he would always _be_ victorious. The raider had been shot twice, but he felt the burn to his ego worse than any wound he had taken.

That would be, eventually, rather brutally ironic. 

The Mandalorian had been introduced to death when he was a child, and it had walked beside him his entire life. He took nothing for granted. Din Djaren was aware he was dying, and had he been alone he might well have been weary enough for the raider to score one more victory. 

However, there was a frightened child and a foundling in between the raider and the dying Mandalorian. The raider did not know it, but he had never been in a more dangerous position in his life.

The girl made a small, choked sound of fear, and the Mandalorian gave up trying to make his useless fingers work his blaster. It was patently impossible for a man in his condition to move, much less fight. Despite this, he threw himself toward the child, pushing her to the ground and shielding her with his armor. The Mandalorian snapped his arm out, his vambrace clicked, and he shot a massive jet of flame directly into the raider’s face.

It was the first time that the raider’s position as resident mechanic had ever worked against him. There had been a difficulty with the engines on one of the speeders the night before they left for the raid, and his jacket was thoroughly stained with engine grease.

The girl watched the flames arc over her and drive the raider back, the yellow light reflected in her eyes. He ignited like a candle. She clung to the Mandalorian’s armor and watched as the man started to flail and scream.

It was a horrific sight, and yet Race was utterly relieved. It was a reaction she would have to come to terms with later.

Like most people not taught otherwise, the raider tried to run from the flames. It was not possible to run from a fire when you were the fire. Race had been taught that, because her parents were sensible people. The raider was not so fortunate.

He cast a terrible light, and the girl and the Mandalorian watched it disappear, screaming, into the trees.

Race turned her eyes from it, accidentally looking into the peaceful silence of the little green baby’s face. He was lying very close to her. Suddenly, she didn’t feel the slightest bit bad for the raider.

He was useful, however, in the sense that his death was terrible enough to send a little flicker through an aspect of the universe that the baby in question was extraordinarily sensitive to.

As Race watched, the baby flinched slightly, frowning. She caught her breath in wonder. It looked to her eyes like he had just come back to life.

The Mandalorian did not see his foundling react. The raider disappeared into the trees and Din Djaren’s sight tunneled in, as if following him. He sagged, his weight rolling him limply onto his back. He could see pieces of the sky, through the leaves. The sky on Trinetrin was a deep violet blue.

For no reason he would ever admit to himself, he recalled that the sky on Sorgan had been a pale blue-grey. The clouds had turned golden in the evenings.

It wasn’t something that Race would have understood. It was difficult for someone who had always lived in one place to understand what the feeling of ‘home’ meant to someone without one.

“No, wait-” Race said to the Mandalorian, distressed. She scooped the baby up, cradled it gently. She had the slightly magical thinking of a child who didn’t know how most things worked. It seemed possible to her that because she’d said the baby was alive, it had somehow made the baby live. As if when she’d ignored the truth, the universe had given her a different one.

“He’s alive, you see?” she held it close to his face. 

‘I believed him back to life’, she thought, but didn’t say. It was nowhere close to the truth, but in that moment she could almost think that was what had happened.

“He’ll live, and you’ll live, and everything will be fine,” she insisted.

The Mandalorian heard her speaking, but couldn’t untangle the words. He tilted his head and looked into the kid’s tiny green face. He’d failed his foundling, and therefore failed The Way. At least, at the very least, the kid was safe.

He meant to attempt to apologise again. It felt right that it should be the last thing he did. The attempt was not particularly successful, as he immediately passed out.

“Hey,” Race said, giving him a shake. “Hey!”

Unsurprisingly, the Mandalorian stayed silent. There was a noise, however, that Race found very surprising. Something was moving around, pushing through the trees.

Race had an image of the raider coming back through, burned and bloody and ready to slit their throats. It was understandable, given the circumstances. 

Wild-eyed, she looked at the body of the Mandalorian and realized she had no one to help her. With a choked sound of terror she turned, scrabbling at the ground until she found his discarded blaster. Quietly, she lifted it, hugging the baby close. 

She was about to make a great and terrible mistake.

Luckily, before she could, her brother demonstrated why he’d been forbidden to ride the buffalos. He tripped, yelped loudly for their mother, and mashed his face into the ground, getting his hair full of thorns in the process.

“Tinnen?” the girl said with rising hope. She dropped the blaster. Her voice went very high. “Mom?”

Her mother stepped out from the trees, a towering pillar of safety in a newly terrifying world. She was breathing hard, having run flat out from the speeder. Race saw the worry on her face, and it was like she’d been given permission to stop being brave.

Race burst into tears.

\------------------------

The Mandalorian slept like a dead man, because he very nearly was one. 

He dreamed of a place that felt like the afterlife. The Mandalorian was certain it couldn’t be. This was not simply because he did not believe in an afterlife one could visit, but because he refused to believe that if he was wrong, the afterlife would look like Arvala-7.

The sunset was all purples and reds and oranges. Fairly spectacular, as sunsets went. He sat on warm sandstone and watched it, looking out across the desert. The temperature was dropping as the sun faded, but the rock radiated heat, keeping the chill at bay. There was something about the place that tugged at him. It felt important.

It was important.

The scenery and the moment it captured reminded him of a few things.

“I shouldn’t have left you,” he said, thinking of the last time he’d sat here. He’d been focused on getting the beskar, then. He looked over. The kid was watching him with big dark eyes. “With the imps. I knew it was wrong.”

The kid made a little burbling sound he was very familiar with. It was the ‘pretend-talk’ noise he made sometimes, when the Mandalorian spoke to him. It was as if he’d grasped that when two people talked, one person made noises and then the other person made noises back, but he still wasn’t sure what the noises meant so he just played along. The Mandalorian tilted his head at the kid, who made an encouraging little ‘ouah’ sound and gave him an expectant look.

‘Your turn’, he seemed to be saying.

The Mandalorian didn’t recall exactly what had happened to him, or why he was there. He wasn’t even sure why the possibility that he might be dead seemed like something he needed to consciously dismiss.

“If I’m alive, I’ll find you,” he said anyway.

From a certain point of view, the Mandalorian was correct about several things. He was not in the afterlife. The afterlife was, in fact, nothing like what he was experiencing. 

However, from a certain point of view, he was also incorrect about several things. The afterlife was exactly like what he was experiencing. That was because he was there.

His foundling looked at him soberly for a moment, his huge ears flicking back, and then lifted his arms. The Mandalorian sighed, and picked him up. The kid made a little happy “ooooh” sound as he was lifted. He liked being carried.

The Mandalorian was good at languages; It didn’t strike him as strange to have picked up meaning from the sounds of someone who hadn’t quite figured words out yet. 

He looked down at the kid, then out at the desert. He wondered, if he started to walk, would he find Kuiil’s home out there? Would it be empty or would he be there, tending his blurrg? 

“You’re not even here, are you,” he said to the kid. “This isn’t real.” 

He thought briefly, that if he _was_ dead then he certainly hoped the kid wasn’t there. The Mandalorian tightened his arms around his foundling, just slightly.

He noticed his beskar necklace was hanging out of the kid’s collar, and he moved to tuck it back. He stroked his thumb over the face of it, hesitating over a thought.

The Mandalorian had some assumptions about the afterlife of his people. Due to those assumptions, he genuinely believed that by wearing that necklace, the kid would go to the same place he would if they died. He had simply not thought about that belief actually applying to his child until that moment.

He was correct in his belief- they would share an afterlife. However, everyone did. It was part of what surrounded and bound the universe together. His foundling had an entirely instinctive understanding of that, but it had nothing to do with wearing a Mandalorian pendant around his neck. 

The kid patted at Din Djaren’s chestplate and shut his eyes. He made a small unhappy noise, like he was straining to reach something he shouldn’t be touching from his seat in the cockpit.

Suddenly there was a nauseating lurch, and from the Mandalorian’s perspective, something hit the world he was standing on very hard with a hammer. His armor rang like a tuning fork, and so did everything else.

To the Mandalorian, It felt as if someone had knocked into a window he was looking through and jostled it, revealing it was actually just a painting all along. There was a sudden shocking unreality to everything around him.

Memories started dropping into place in his mind in jagged chunks and fractured images. Racing toward his ship at top speed across the fields of Trinetrin. Two speeders exploding against thin air.

Something jolted in his chest, and when the Mandalorian inhaled it felt like his lungs were bigger than they’d been before. His chest had been so tight he could barely breathe, but somehow he hadn’t even noticed. He hadn’t realized he felt weak, until he abruptly felt stronger.

Two speeders had exploded against thin air, and a raider got in a single lucky shot at the exact moment and angle she needed to get past his beskar chestplate. He’d coughed pink foam, spat it against the inside of his helmet. He remembered that.

He looked down at the foundling in his arms. It seemed to the Mandalorian that the kid was suddenly infinitely more real than anything else, like a star in empty space- the gravity well had him in orbit. The kid’s ears were pulled down and back. He looked as though he was straining harder than Din Djaren had ever seen. He looked like he was hurting.

A spike of ice drove itself down the Mandalorian’s spine.

“Stop,” Din Djaren hissed, horrified. He pushed the kid’s hands away furiously. “Stop it!”

The child made a short, anguished sound, reaching for him. He saw pain in someone he loved. He was too young to understand anything but that.

“No,” the Mandalorian said forcefully. He held his foundling out at arm’s length, away from his chest. The only thing the kid could reach was his hands. 

He was in a metaphorical space, not a physical one, but in this case it didn’t matter. The emotion mattered. The child was too young for words, but his abilities meant that feelings were fairly clear. 

“You don’t do that.” The Mandalorian continued, fear and love fighting it out in his heart. “Understand? I take care of you. You don’t take care of me.”

The sun had set rapidly, and the darkness was closing in.

The child made a brief, uncertain sound. The Mandalorian took it as an agreement.

“Good,” he sighed in relief, shutting his eyes. “Great.”

\-------------------------

In a place both far away and intimately close, the readings relayed by the emergency medical droid who was caring for the Mandalorian took a turn for the better. 

Relieved, Race and her brother finally allowed their mother to put them to bed. Their mother sat with Race for a long time. It was a comfort to them both. 

Afterward, she went to check on the baby. He wasn’t doing as well as the Mandalorian, but she had been keeping that fact from her children. His vital signs had taken a dip when the Mandalorian started to improve; She hoped he would still be alive when his father woke. She’d put him in Tinnen’s old pod, and she made sure it was hovering close by, so as soon as he opened his eyes he would see his child there, safe. It was what she would have wanted, if it was her child.

She and her husband stayed up late, talking.

They were the closest ranch to the crash. Most of the raiders were dead, but they knew very well that the ones that were left would come to their home first. 

“Do you think you got all the weapons?” she asked.

After they got the Mandalorian stable, her husband had gone back out to the crash. He had hoped that perhaps he could drag the pieces of the speeders away and hide the bodies, but there was too much evidence spread over too wide an area.

“All the ones I could find.” 

Every weapon the raiders had carried currently resided in his workshop, along with all the ammunition he could find on them. Like his wife, he was a practical person. 

“I’ll stay up tonight, just in case,” he added, and set his blaster on the table.

He needn’t have bothered. The remainder of the raiders wouldn’t discover the crash until sunrise. It would be a full day before their family found the first buffalo dead from a blaster shot.


	3. Chapter 3

An explosion shocked the Mandalorian into something close to awareness. The sound and feel of it, the thump in the ground beneath him, sent him crashing headlong into a sense memory he wasn’t ever far away from. When he opened his eyes, for a split second the room wasn’t there. He saw that moment from his childhood when the battle droid pulled the doors open above him, ready to fire at him.

In the real world there was an emergency medical droid there, and regrettably, it was standing far too close. 

He reacted on instinct, snarling and kicking out at it.The Mandalorian was no longer a child. The emotions he’d felt as a child, however, were undiluted. 

The droid reeled back with a distinctly droid-specific squeal of alarm. It had done double-duty as a general house and nurse droid for years and it only really had medical information to cover emergencies, so its programming was something of a hodge-podge. A real medical droid would have undoubtedly known better than to hover so close to a confused, wounded man.

As the droid stumbled, it knocked into the baby pod hovering close, sending it spinning lazily across the room.

The Mandalorian tried to push himself up, his mind scattered and alarmed. The kid, he thought. He needed to protect the kid. The instinct was welded to his heart as surely as his signet had been welded to his pauldron.

The tightness across his chest stopped him cold.

The feeling of soaking in a bacta wrap was a very unique one. Once it had been experienced, it was something that burned itself cleanly into one’s memory. It was like nothing else.

The Mandalorian lay back with a sharp exhalation, lifting his arms out and away from his torso. He had a full chest wrap, which he found immediately alarming. It was an understandable reaction.

Bacta tanks were expensive and uncommon outside of the Core. A full wrap was about the best that could possibly be hoped for as far as medical care, at least anywhere the Mandalorian was willing to go. It wasn’t used often; People who were injured badly enough to need them could seldom get to one fast enough to stay alive. 

All at once, the Mandalorian recalled his dream, and wondered just how close he’d come to death. If had known the truth, he would have regretted wondering about it.

With a pang, the Mandalorian turned his eyes on his foundling. He was reminded of the feeling of his lungs expanding, of pushing his foundling away with a lightning bolt of realization.

The child was sleeping, its dreams strange and dark. The Mandalorian could not tell that he was alive at first, and a howling sense of horror and panic started to twist itself up into his throat. Then he saw the child breathe, and his relief at the sight left him lightheaded. 

The Mandalorian had rarely, in his life, had the opportunity to love and be loved by anyone. Due to this, he had fiercely gathered the child close to the part of himself that spoke of family, and the thought of anything taking that from him threatened to crack his heart wide open.

When Race had discovered the two of them lying among dead raiders in the woods, there had been some faint echo of that sentiment left lingering in the air. It caught at her young heart, though she hadn’t understood why.

After bringing the Mandalorian to their home, Race’s parents had removed his breastplate, along with his belt. They had yanked his tunic all the way up under his armpits, ripping one of the seams in their haste to get the fabric out of the way. The bacta wrap had been applied to bare skin, slightly crooked on one side. The children had stood in the corner, crying, and their parents hadn’t had the time to shoo them out of the room. 

They had been in a hurry to get it on and keep him alive, and it looked like it. The Mandalorian, not being blind, noticed this. He tugged experimentally at the wrap. A proper medical droid might have scoffed. 

It was extremely important for a bacta wrap to remain in place, and the manufacturers had gone to heroic lengths to ensure that. In fact, the wrap had acquired a reputation as one of the best glues ever made. Without access to some kind of medical droid or the right proprietary chemicals, it could take weeks to fall off on its own. It was a common saying that a good bacta wrap could weld two ships together, if the circumstances were right. 

The Mandalorian looked up at the droid and snapped at it impatiently. “Get it off me.” Getting his armor on over the wrap would be difficult, if not outright impossible. He was a Mandalorian who found himself vulnerable in uncertain circumstances. He needed to get his armor on like he needed to breathe.

The droid, terrified, beeped doubtfully. The Mandalorian put his hands flat against the cot beneath him and shoved himself upright with one great heave of effort. There was some suggestion of violence in the reaction, and the droid in question retreated slightly.

The floor underneath them both rumbled in the unforgettable sensation of an explosion going off, not very far away. The Mandalorian was surprised, having thought the sound he’d heard was part of a dream. He looked to the door, but nothing was coming through to kill them right at that moment.

In fact, they had nearly an hour until anyone would break into the house.

The droid looked at the Mandalorian, and the Mandalorian looked at the droid. The droid made a concerned comment about the situation. It came out as a hesitant warble. Despite the lack of a shared language, the sentiment was recognizable.

“Get it off me,” the Mandalorian repeated, his tone of voice quite different. The droid hurried to comply.

The Mandalorian was in a windowless room that doubled as a storage room when not in use as a medical station. It did not look industrial, because it wasn’t. Someone’s house, he concluded.

His armor was stacked neatly on top of a table by the door, his weapons beside it. He’d been given an exceedingly expensive bacta wrap. The child was alive, resting in a cosy-looking pod within his eyesight. His helmet hadn’t even been touched.

He was with kind people, he realized.

The Mandalorian was more right than he knew. 

He considered his own fractured memories for a moment. There had been a girl. He thought there had been a girl. He supposed she must have helped him. 

The moment the Mandalorian was free, he went to retrieve his armor and weapons. However, he hesitated beside his foundling, gently drawing the pod away from the wall. He briefly touched the child’s hand with his fingertips. His emotions were soft with worry and affection and loyalty. Nothing inspired more fidelity in a Mandalorian than when a foundling was involved, and the strength of the emotion soothed the child from afar. The child loved the Mandalorian because of what the child could feel from him, not from any words that had ever been spoken between them. Language was still difficult, but emotions were clear as crystal.

Once he was re-armored, the Mandalorian paused by the door. He looked back at the droid, who was quietly fretting to itself. The droid knew precisely what was going on, but had been ordered to remain where it was. It was wishing it had been fitted to speak Standard.

Silently, the Mandalorian touched the rim of the child’s pod and looked directly at the droid. Beeping softly, the droid reached out. The Mandalorian gave the pod a gentle nudge in its direction, and the droid pulled the child close. It placed itself between the pod and the door.

“Thank you,” the Mandalorian said quietly, and meant it. The Mandalorian’s feelings regarding the day his parents had been killed were undiluted. At that moment, however, he had softer, fresher emotions regarding droids.

The Mandalorian stepped through the door into the dark, his hand hovering prudently near his blaster. The lights were off in the main area of the house. Race and her brother Tinnen didn’t notice the Mandalorian enter, because they were both crowded by the open door, looking past the wide porch and across the fields. They were not supposed to be standing there. They had both promised to hide in the storage room with the Mandalorian and the baby. They had both lied outrageously. 

“Who are you? What’s going on?” The Mandalorian said without preamble.

The children jumped and whirled around as if they’d been caught doing something they shouldn’t, because they were doing something they shouldn’t.

“You,” The Mandalorian said sharply, recognizing the girl he only half remembered. Belatedly, he realized both she and the boy with her were in tears, and regretted his tone of voice. They looked _afraid_ of him. He lifted both hands up in a soothing gesture.

“I won’t hurt you,” he said, much more gently. “I just need to know what’s happening.”

The children were not, in fact, afraid of him. They had a great deal else to be afraid of.

“Mom and Dad went to fight the raiders,” Tinnen blurted out, gesturing vaguely out at the fields beyond the doorway. The house was similar to most houses in the region, planted on stilts a good three meters off the ground and granting a clear, expansive view of the land around it.

At the moment there was little in the way of a view, given that the sun had set.

Race lifted her hand, which was holding a pair of binocs. “We were watching,” she said thickly, “but we can’t see them anymore.”

The Mandalorian tapped his vambrace. “Wait here,” he said, and stepped past them, through the doorway.

The Mandalorian’s helmet flipped obediently to view an overlay of traditionally invisible parts of the energy spectrum. Heat signatures painted themselves across rolling hills that he could suddenly see clearly.

There were four raiders still alive, and they had been having a very bad day. One of them, wisely, had ducked away when the locals had started throwing overloading power cells at them, stolen from the guns of their former comrades. He did not know the power cells had been theirs, and he didn’t care. He was thinking of taking up a quiet life as a farmer, or a less quiet life as almost anything except a raider running for his life through the hills. He didn’t have much of a sense of direction, but ‘away’ sounded simple enough. He was, perhaps, a coward, but he was a live coward, and that was all that mattered to him. He wouldn’t live a particularly long life, but he would live a bit longer than the raiders in his group who had decided a lone Mandalorian positively dripping with beskar armor was a perfectly reasonable target to go after.

The Mandalorian could see his heat signature, a crooked line that was far away and getting farther, and dismissed it for the moment. He could not be blamed for that decision; He was distracted by the remaining three raiders, and the two people ahead of them that they were obviously tracking. 

Their parents had run out of power cells.

He let out a breath. “Do you have a speeder?” he asked, turning toward the children huddled by the door. Their family had gone very far out of their way to help him and his foundling. Both by Creed and by personal temperament, his obligation to them was massive.

“Mom and Dad took the speeder,” Race said.

“You have mounts? Anything I could ride.” His voice was tense. The Mandalorian was nearly the only thing standing in the way of the two children in front of him becoming orphans, and after seeing the position their parents were in, he knew it. He would never reach their parents in time on foot.

“No-” Race said, at the exact same moment her brother spoke.

“You could ride the buffalo,” Tinnen said, with a surge of childish excitement. “You can ride Big Boy.” Terrifying situation or not, it was difficult to stamp down the enthusiasm of a child who had just realized they had information an adult desperately needed and would likely be impressed by.

“Where is it?” the Mandalorian said instantly. They didn’t have a great deal of time.

Race was not impressed. She was openly gaping.

“This way!” Tinnen said, grabbing the Mandalorian’s hand. The boy felt suddenly like he was important, that he had a way to help his parents, and that gave him a great deal of confidence. He tugged the Mandalorian toward the stairs that led from the porch to the ground.

His confidence was somewhat misplaced, but it was entirely well-meaning.

“Are you crazy?” Race said incredulously, regaining the power of speech. She followed along behind them both. “Tinnen, tell him you’re crazy, he can’t ride Big Boy. No one can ride him.”

This was untrue. Tinnen himself had ridden Big Boy multiple times. They had unfortunately been rather short rides that usually ended up with Tinnen face down in the dirt and the buffalo with large angry scratches down his sides. Almost the only thing that could damage one of the big males were horns from another big male. Of course, this also meant they could damage themselves, if they were annoyed enough to try and dislodge an irritating rider.

Big Boy found Tinnen almost as irritating as Race did, but loved him much less.

“Just because you can’t ride him, doesn’t mean nobody can,” Tinnen said sharply. He was a good deal less apt to hold a grudge than Big Boy was, and didn’t resent the time he’d spent face down in the dirt. He was certain Big Boy would come around to liking him eventually.

He was correct in that belief, however he was overly optimistic in his estimation of how much time it would take.

Their family kept the buffalo that weren’t safe to let loose yet under the house, toward the back. New mothers and their newborns. Their parents had let the rest of the buffalo out into the fields before the fighting started, and let Big Boy loose under the house to protect the calves. Their parents trusted the animals to react sensibly to their respective situations. Red Buffalo were very clever. Only the people who worked closely with them ever realized just how clever.

There had been a lot of noise that evening. The mothers were nervous, and Big Boy was not in the best of moods. Two of the older calves had been killed earlier in the day. The rest of the herd was unpleasantly far away, gone out to pasture, where he couldn’t protect them.

Big Boy was a massive, mountainous, deadly-looking creature with a blood red hide thick enough to shake off a blaster shot. He had the confidence that came with those facts, and that confidence was not misplaced. He was not aware he was a prize winning specimen of his species. However, he was possessed of the vague arrogance that he was tougher than any other living thing on the planet, and given the day he’d had, he was somewhat keen to prove it.

The Mandalorian had been caught off guard at the argument that had erupted between the two children walking him back toward the stalls. Seeing the pure dismay on Race’s face, he felt a flash of somewhat pointless doubt. If this creature was all they had, he would have to figure out some way to get it to carry him.

“Just what kind of animal is-” he began, and stopped. He was silent for a beat. They had found the stalls.

Big Boy stood in front of the mothers. He looked down at the Mandalorian, and was not impressed.

“Okay,” the Mandalorian said, in the exact manner of someone saying ‘oh, fuck.’


End file.
